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Constitution and Strategy: Understanding Canadian Power in the World Irvin Studin

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Constitution and Strategy: Understanding Canadian Power in the World Irvin Studin Osgoode Hall Law School of York University Osgoode Digital Commons Research Papers, Working Papers, Conference Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy Papers Research Report No. 4/2009 Constitution and Strategy: Understanding Canadian Power in the World Irvin Studin Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/clpe Recommended Citation Studin, Irvin, "Constitution and Strategy: Understanding Canadian Power in the World" (2009). Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy. Research Paper No. 4/2009. http://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/clpe/119 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Research Papers, Working Papers, Conference Papers at Osgoode Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy by an authorized administrator of Osgoode Digital Commons. CLPE RESEARCH PAPER 04/2009 Irvin Studin Constitution and Strategy: Understanding Canadian Power in the World EDITORS: Peer Zumbansen (Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto, Director, Comparative Research in Law and Political Economy, York University), John W. Cioffi (University of California at Riverside), Lindsay Krauss (Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto, Production Editor) CLPE RESEARCH PAPER XX/2007 • VOL. XX NO. XX (2007) CLPE Research Paper 04/2009 Vol. 05 No. 01 (2009) Irvin Studin CONSTITUTION AND STRATEGY: UNDERSTANDING CANADIAN POWER IN THE WORLD Abstract: In this article, Irvin Studin provides a wide-ranging audit of Canada's Constitution, broadly defined, to distill an original picture of Canadian strategic power in the world. Whereas Canadian constitutional scholarship and jurisprudence are typically rooted in considerations of federalism and Charter rights, this article attempts to usher in a 'third school' of Canadian constitutional discourse exercised by the relationship between the Constitution and strategy--that is, the ways in which the Constitution explains and informs the federal state's capacity to pursue strategic interests in the world. The said audit focuses on the constitutional treatment of the diplomatic and military instruments of the Canadian state, as well as the constitutional treatment of key 'factors of strategic power' like executive efficiency, natural resources, the economy and the national population--factors of power that impact the potency of the diplomatic and military instruments. The audit centres around what Studin calls Canada's Strategic Constitution, and issues in a determination that while Canada was not, at its constitutional genesis, made to project strategic power in the world, and while Canada lacks a deep jurisprudential culture of strategic affairs, the federal state indeed has significant strategic capacity; that is, Canada's Constitution suggests considerable Canadian strategic power, even if policy-political praxis does not necessarily translate this theoretical constitutional capacity into on-the-ground outcomes. Key words: Canadian Constitution, Strategy, Power, Foreign Affairs JEL classification: K10, K30 i Author Contact: Irvin Studin Osgoode Hall Law School, York University 4700 Keele St, Toronto Ontario, M3J 1P3 Email: [email protected] ii CONSTITUTION AND STRATEGY: UNDERSTANDING CANADIAN POWER IN THE WORLD Irvin Studin* “[L]aw and strategy are not merely made in history... They are made of history.” (Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles, 2002)1 In Canada, after the English and the French, perhaps the most significant historical solitudes are the Constitution and strategy. Indeed, while Canada’s constitutional framework and its various constitutional debates give ample expression to the first two solitudes, they are largely silent on strategy—strategy here understood in the classical international relations sense of ‘strategic’ instruments of state employed to project ‘strategic’ 2 power in the world. * Irvin Studin is assistant director of the Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security at Osgoode Hall Law School. He lectures at both Osgoode Hall and the Glendon School of Public Affairs (York Univerity), and is founding editor- in-chief of Geokrat Magazine. He wishes to sincerely thank Warren Newman, Patrick Monahan, Fred Lazar and Gus Van Harten for commenting on successive drafts of this article. 1 Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), p. 5 2 It is noteworthy that many definitions of ‘strategy’ privilege the military aspect of power, as in Colin S. Gray’s Modern Strategy (New York: OUP, 1999) at p. 17: “Strategy is the bridge that relates military power to political purpose”; see also Hervé Coutau-Bégarie’s Traité de Stratégie (Paris: Economica, 2002) at p. 27 or Book II, Chapter 1 of Clausewitz’s classic Vom Kriege. The U.S. Department of Defense, for its part, defines ‘national strategy’ more expansively as the “art and science of developing and using the political, economic and psychological powers of a nation-state, together with its armed forces during peace and war, to serve national objectives.” [Joint Chiefs of Staff, D.O.D. Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, JCS Joint Pub 1-02 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 23 March, 1994) at p. 255] And economic power is emphasized in the important volume from the Russian Academy of Sciences—Economic Institute, called Strategicheskiy Otvet Rossiyi na Vysovy Novovo Veka (Russia’s Strategic Response to the Challenges of the New Century) (Moscow: Examen, 2004) . In this 2 CLPE RESEARCH PAPER SERIES [VOL. 05 NO. 01 This constitutional silence is hardly accidental. The seldom examined second recital of the preamble to the Constitution Act, 1867 (once the British North America Act, 1867, and hereafter the ‘1867 Act’), reads that the “Union would conduce to the Welfare of the Provinces and promote the Interests of the British Empire.” The only provision of the 1867 Act that explicitly references foreign affairs is section 132, although it speaks to the implementation by Canada of imperial or British Empire treaty obligations. But let us return to section 132 later on in this piece. For now, one can propose with reasonable certainty that both the character and paucity of explicit language on strategy in the text of the founding legal document of the modern Canadian state betray a fundamental reality: that Canada, constitutionally speaking, was never intended or expected to be a power player of any note in the world, but rather an appendage or ‘auxiliary kingdom’ of the British empire—its instruments and interests subsumed to the strategic designs and direction of Westminster.3 Canada’s astrategic constitutional conception finds expression in both Canadian constitutional scholarship and constitutional jurisprudence. Canadian constitutional scholars and courts have been animated historically by concerns of federalism or federal-provincial division of powers—largely exclusive of foreign or strategic affairs—and, increasingly, particularly since the advent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, questions of civil liberties. (Much like the text of the Constitution Act, 1867, the text of the Constitution Act, 1982—herafter the ‘1982 Act’—, in which the Charter figures prominently, is conspicuously silent on foreign affairs; the domestic realm is king.) International relations scholars or strategic analysts in Canada, in turn, are little piece, let us be clear, however, that we understand strategy as encompassing both the military and diplomatic instruments that serve Canadian (national) strategic interests or objectives, however defined. 3 Writes Jack Granatstein in Canada’s Army: Waging War and Keeping the Peace (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002) at p. 10: “Strategy was the province of the imperial masters, not the Canadians, whether French- or English-speaking. […] Strategy was not for Canadians to decide; tactics, perhaps, but strategy, never.” Surely, I would offer, this must mean that our Constitution is at most tactical in character! 2009] CONSTITUTION AND STRATEGY 3 concerned with the Constitution. They focus primarily on the international order (or international structures, systems and dynamics), and typically see the Canadian domestic order—politics, really, far more than the Constitution—as relevant only at the level of strategic decision-making or praxis by the federal government: to go or not to go to war; or more or less funding for defence or foreign affairs. Indeed, certain species of ‘realist’ international relations scholars, borrowing heavily from the neoclassical economic theory of the firm, may even fancy the domestic order altogether irrelevant. So we come closer to our problématique: the constitutionalists are radically inward-looking, and the strategists are, with few exceptions, constitutional philistines. The incommensurability would be acceptable were it not for the exotic possibility—nay, probability—that, conceptually speaking, the Constitution and strategy are but flip sides of the same Canadian enterprise (the state), or at least the legitimacy of that enterprise. More precisely, the suggestion is that the Constitution, concerned as it is with law, is representative of the internal legitimacy of the Canadian state, while strategy, concerned as it is with power, is representative of the external legitimacy of the Canadian state. The British historian Michael Howard says as much in his Preface to Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles. He writes: This is Bobbitt’s starting point: “Law and strategy are mutually affecting.”
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